Articles Tagged with Open Source

Open Source continues to be an important part of the mix in Virtualization and Cloud. Indeed, this year has seen major developments in established players at the Operating System and Hypervisor level, as well as a major new cloud entry at the IaaS cloud layer.

We don’t do Politics here at the Virtualization Practice, but we do need to look at the biggest Cloud Computing story of the year – WikiLeaks. For those who haven’t been following it the relevant points are

Wikileaks has posted some confidential data on the internet

Various attempts have been made to shut it down

Various countermeasures have been taken by Wikileaks and its supporters.

We are covering this story because we believe that the enormous coverage of this particular sequence of events is much more likely to shape the future of cloud computing through its impact at the “C” Executive level (i.e. CEO, CIO and CFO) than any vendor announcement or technology trend that impacts IT.

Red Hat announced on November 30, 2010, for an undisclosed sum, the acquisition of startup PaaS vendor, Makara, which provides a deployment platform for most of the Open Source application stacks (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Java, Tomcat and JBoss) onto most of the IaaS cloud infrastructures (Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Rackspace Cloud, VMware vCloud, Terremark, Cloud.com and Eucalyptus). Makara is not open source, although the company was committed to open sourcing in due course, and Red Hat is aiming to accelerate that process.

On October 22nd, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project. The announcement caused a great deal of interest here at the Virtualization Practice, as it signals an unexpected willingness on Microsoft’s part to pursue interoperability at the IaaS layer, allowing users to break out of the Hyper-v stack, whilst still retaining Hyper-v at the bottom. The fact this announcement came from Microsoft (not Cloud.com, Rackspace or OpenStack) seems to signal the seriousness of the intent.

In practical terms this means that Cloud.com puts a Hypervisor Abstraction Layer into the bottom of the OpenStack compute platform (Nova), and binds Hyper-V into that, to allow images to be deployed to and controlled on Hyper-V from OpenStack, using tooling that speaks one or other of the two OpenStack APIs (Native or Amazon EC2). Technically it is not a major step because although the initial version of Nova targeted libvirt and thereby Xen, KVM and Qemu, Citrix had already succceeded in providing a hypervisor abstraction layer in OpenStack for XenServer.

We’ve been following Eucalyptus for some time, and they recently invited us to a briefing about a new alliance called NRE, which is a credible group of independent vendors, newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus.

This wasn’t spun from an Open Source prespective and it was interesting to see the Eucalyptus positioning to the general marketplace. Eucalyptus is positioned as the “leading” Open Source cloud, the benefit of Open Source being it is “on your own terms”. It offers IAAS in the data center, just like Amazon Web Services. It is Elastic, based on industry standard APIs, hypervisor agnostic, supports both Windows & Linux guests, and has a huge ecosystem. It’s the elasticity and the scalability that are driving the adoption. Pricing is secondary, and you also get the feeling that it’s not traditional enterprises which are picking it up.

Around this time last year we were tracking the development of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a Eucalyptus-based solution that is bundled into the Ubuntu installation from 9.10 onwards and allows you to install a IaaS cloud into which you subsequently install Ubuntu Server instances, rather than directly installing an Ubuntu Server. The Eucalyptus proposition is that the cloud you create is identical from an API – and therefore a tooling – perspective to an Amazon EC2 cloud, and the same Ubuntu instances can run inside it, and even can be cloud-bursted out to it. Canonical make a lot of this duality in their positioning of Eucalyptus and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It feels very-much like an “onramp” message that we hear from VMware.